Taibbi: “All over, ‘smart’ lost its luster. ‘Smart’ bombs turned out mainly to be efficient machines for creating civilian casualties, ‘intelligence’ became a synonym for grotesque security oversights and mass law-breaking, and commercial media especially became a place where the ordinary person could see the almost total moral uselessness of advanced degrees. In one of Sandel’s most interesting passages, he talks about the conclusions the average person drew from watching the increasing vapidity of ‘ what passes for political argument’ in public discourse: ‘Citizens across the political spectrum find this empty public discourse frustrating and disempowering. They rightly sense that the absence of robust public debate does not mean that no policies are being decided. It simply means they are being decided elsewhere, out of public view…’”#
Dave: Facebook is at least seven things. Journalists don’t distinguish. (Me: I think it’s worse than that. I think journalists for the most part ignore the user community, except when they can use it to tell a preconceived story, for example about disinformation. I think Facebook’s connections to the rest of the web barely register as a story, except when news publications are suffering. The story of how Facebook impacts communities at a human level is very interesting but will require time and patience that is mostly lacking in journalism.)#
It’s interesting to me that Twitter can tell me whenever someone mentions my tweet, but no blog or web platform can tell me when someone mentions a post, even though the enabling technology is baked into the web. #
it’s also interesting to me that I wasn’t able to find a namespace extension to RSS for likes or re-shares, even though these have become ubiquitous online social patterns, even implemented on some blogging platforms. I’m surprised no one has created this. (It makes sense it wasn’t built in when RSS started, because the social platforms and patterns didn’t exist yet. But there is a namespace extension mechanism, and at least one “social” open format (namespace?) adopted once by some blog platforms, though it does not do likes or re-shares.)#
(None of this is a complaint about this or any other blog platform. I’m just surprised it has not been done. When I used to think about building my own publishing platform this was a feature I envisioned. Maybe I can build it some day, maybe as an extension to something else.)#
Leighton Woodhouse: “Foucault … believed that the modern state is not an edifice that looms, metaphorically, over its citizens, as it was in the feudal era, but one that permeates us through our culture, in our daily lives, in our very minds. It’s generated from within the society that the state is tasked with administering — specifically, by its intelligentsia.” #
I’ve been reading a very good book about Finnish independence and civil war. Time after time, the Reds snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. For all their talk of revolution, they were too timid to enact one. They wanted history to take care of it for them (as they believed their their guiding Marxist theories foretold). Their biggest mistake was backing down from the general strike that preceded and helped precipitate the civil war. They had a genuine surge of worker revolutionary sentiment on their hands. Instead of feeling empowered, they felt scared. Fundamentally, they did not trust the workers. Fundamentally, at all pivotal moments, they acted like the bourgeoisie they supposedly wanted to overthrow. #
(I’m talking here specifically of the socialist political leadership, mostly the SDP elite. The revolutionary workers councils and red guards and union members were all much more strident, although at one key moment one of the councils did lose its nerve as well, as I recall.)#
This makes me think of Bernie Sanders. In his backbone and ideological consistency, Sanders is a giant among senators and within the whole Congress. As a presidential candidate he repeatedly prioritized preserving personal relationships and his self conception — what I believe he’d call his principles — over winning.#
He pulled the punch when asked about a second order Hillary Clinton coverup, and was applauded. But the scandal (however minor, relatively) pointed to a real and repeated issue for the candidate, and a more eager opponent seized on it to decisive effect in the general election. #
He put his friendship with Joe Biden over his opposition to much of what Biden stood for, and refused to meaningfully draw contrasts between his (often much more popular) positions and Biden’s. This despite accepting huge amounts of individual donations from ordinary people who wanted him to win. In the end the establishment (of course) still conspired against his candidacy to an extraordinary degree, for the second time. #
None of which is to say he’s a bad person or politician — he’s admirable, in fact — but he’s not a good model for a winning leftist presidential candidate. To be honest someone like that will resemble Trump in many aspects of their campaign approach, along with Bernie and others. #
The example of Finland in 1917/1918 makes clear the cost of niceties, decorum, and using ego and precious maxims to guide tactics. It is a ruin. #
A pundit the other day accurately referred to one of the U.S’s most recent wars as “debased.” I think that’s also an accurate way to refer to the state of our nation right now. #
I think the path toward restoring unity and progress in my country runs inevitably through massive improvements in how we collectively synthesize and communicate information. We need a much more trustworthy process for distributing knowledge. #
The current stage of our pandemic is obviously fueled by poor knowledge transfer. It’s not just the misinformation available online — it’s also the way the drugs industry has indeed corrupted our medical establishment and regulatory system, the history of deception by our elected officials, the history of basic errors by journalists, and the poor quality of medical journalism, including routinely failing to provide context for studies and events. Even if journalists and authorities happen to be right about the vaccine (which for the record they mostly are), the history of being very wrong in other contexts (like opioids) lends credence to bad information. #
Starting twenty years ago, two successive national hysterias, and a stream of misinformation from authorities, coupled with poor fact checking by journalists, led us into two misguided wars (only one brave politician dared oppose the first). #
Every election I have been alive for expresses the fundamental dysfunction in this country between poorly communicated truths and misleading or outright false information propagated by the corrupt and unwitting. The reason money plays such a large role in our political process is that truth is so fungible in this country — political ads gain power as trust in various informational institutions (like journalism) erodes, often for good reason. #
For many years I focused on the journalism industry, because I know first hand it has a huge problem with quality, including accuracy and other nuance, and other elements of trust. It is also poor at clarity, context, and providing information with greater shelf life. #
But I now see this problem goes beyond any one industry. We are collectively responsible for educating one another, and education is a lifetime thing. That word doesn’t just mean schools. As Philip Greenspun began teaching us in the late 1990s, education is a huge part of what happens on all kinds of websites and other information systems. Journalism, when done well, is education. Ditto Wikipedia, StackOverflow, SeriousEats, and many more entities. #
In California, where I lived for many years, the government subsidizes continuing education for adults through a strong community college system (and excellent two tier system of four year universities). #
In other countries, the government owns and funds news media, including public television networks. They even fund political campaigns, while capping or forbidding donations and limiting expenditures. #
Journalism in this country has, and has long had, a massive quality problem. It is basically run by people too hidebound and insulated to care, even 25+ years into the age of mass internet (they do care even more now about clicks, views, ratings, and selling hard to cancel subscriptions, for better or worse). #
But this country doesn’t need to rely nearly so much on journalists any longer, just as it doesn’t need to rely so much on tv networks, cable networks, or YouTube. With the right efforts, funding, and focus, this country from the government down can rehabilitate its information system on a huge scale. I point to some possible areas of focus a bit here but this needs everyone’s imagination and effort. It would be very good for this country and is long overdue. #
PS The work Dave has been doing building and advocating open platforms and formats for many years is going to be an important part any healthy change to our information system, from where I sit, key to all this. (In fact to me this goes without saying, but I should probably say it.)#
Kristen Breitweiser lost her husband 20 years ago in the 9/11 attacks. The activism she has done since has been remarkable. Through meticulous research and tenacious work pushing Congress and the national security establishment, she and fellow 9/11 families sparked the creation of the 9/11 commission and helped enact a series of federal reforms. #
Today at The Intercept we publish her call to unseal intelligence to bring 9/11 co-conspirators to trial. She points out that for all the infringement of civil liberties since 9/11, for all the torture and war, which she condemns, not one 9/11 conspirator has been fully prosecuted in our courts. In fact, the “bare knuckle” treatment of prisoners has actually hindered the pursuit of actual justice for victims’ families. #
It is a powerful piece by a relentless person with hard-won wisdom: #
Terry Albury: “The reality of what I was a part of hit me in a way that just shattered my existence. There is this mythology surrounding the war on terrorism, and the F.B.I., that has given agents the power to ruin the lives of completely innocent people based solely on what part of the world they came from, or what religion they practice, or the color of their skin. And I did that. I helped destroy people. For 17 years.”#
These past two days have been the most beautiful in NYC this year. Many of my fellow local journalists seem to have spent them denouncing people on Twitter. My kids pulled me out of all that. They wanted to join me on my daily run. Nothing like pushing a double-wide stroller around Prospect Park at 6mph to snap you back into sunny, sweaty reality!#
It also helped that I had a 5am shift at the local co-op. Up at 3:30, and walking through Park Slope in the wake of Ida an hour later. The low ebb of the neighborhood at that hour is lovely. Not empty, just slow, even peaceful, which you don't get much, even in Brooklyn, even in the park. Anyway, apparently the co-op's basement, where the food backstock is kept, flooded during the storm. Not the worst impact of the storm by a long shot, some New Yorkers lost their lives. #
At the co-op, the water didn't touch the food because everything is kept at least six inches off the floor, usually on plastic pallets that are everywhere down there. They had drained it by the time my shift started, but were still dealing with the residual water. Eventually they'd have to clean the floors with bleach. But it was too early for any of us member workers to help. The truck traffic (my job is usually unloading pallets of produce coming off the trucks) was light due to the weather, and pecifically due to accidents that backed up post-storm traffic. #
This is pretty much my life — the square mile or so around my apartment in south Park Slope ("South Slope") Brooklyn. I love it. This sort of focus is very healthy for me. The pandemic has intensified these confines, which can feel claustrophobic, mostly within the walls of my apartment, and only from time to time. But one thing I've learned about New York in the seven years since I moved here is that most New Yorkers live "small" lives, geographically, like this, even before the pandemic. It doesn't mean your life isn't very rich and "big" in other ways. But until I moved here I had no idea how far 10 blocks really feels, once you live here. That's maybe a 10 minute walk. At a certain point you develop this attitude of, "how much better could something be, some store or restaurant or whatever, that it's worth going beyond the three or four blocks I'm really comfortable visiting?" Especially when in those three or four blocks, in New York, there can be quite a lot.#
I like to think I picked a good little area for myself. South Slope still has a soul. Pete Hamill, whose journalism inspired me when I was kid, grew up two blocks down, and briefly lived about a block up my street. He wrote a whole memoir about this neighborhood (and about his relationship with alcohol). My landlord, who must be 90, knew Pete since they were kids. You won't find many New Yorkers who will speak well of their landlords, but mine is a decent guy, at least these days, who helped promote and develop this corner of Brooklyn. There is a great gym across the street at the old armory, a spectacular YMCA, that our outgoing mayor had a hand in saving, and where I was sort saved myself, although that's a story for another day. We have three great bars, which is important, each distinctively great - the Double Windsor for good food and beer and people a little like me; Farrell's, the oldest bar, and with a crowd of people a little unlike me (a lot of cops, for example); and American Cheese, a total dive that's open late. #
There's Cafe Grumpy, my coffee shop since our first morning here, fresh off a cab ride from JFK, with a seventh month old and no plates or silverware, our coffee pot left behind in Berkeley.#
And then there's the park, the irreplaceable Prospect Park. And the co-op. And the new cheese store. And the new bakery that's the one thing the food critics like in our neighborhood (it is indeed good). And on and on. It's nice to have a neighborhood. Sure beats Twitter.#
When I was in college I used to read Dave Winer's Scripting News. I'd read his DaveNet email newsletter, and his Wired column of the same name. The term "blog" did not exist yet, but I knew I wanted something like Scripting News. I wanted it for my college paper, where I was an editor (eventually the editor in chief), and I wanted it for myself. #
Recently, amid a lot of toxicity on Twitter, and feeling the need for some kind of outlet in my middle age (midlife crisis blogging?), I started to look for a way to blog in that Scripting News style, where you don't need to give everything a headline like on most blogging tools, and where it's wired up to a good easy authoring environment, like an outliner. But also where you can give more depth and context than on $#%ing Twitter. I didn't really find it and made some plans to build something myself some day, maybe, eventually....#
Then I saw Dave has a new tool, built to write Scripting News style. I saw this.... on Scripting News. Which is 25 years old, give or take!#
Today, I finally have it for myself. Two decades in, I can blog like Scripting News. Cooool.#
There is a big temptation for computer geeks like me to bikeshed — I think that word means, like, faff around — with blogging software. Like when I started to learn about tis new tool, Drummer, I started thinking thoughts like#
Can I make a new name for the blog, not just "blog?"#
I'm sure I can and will "fix" some of this stuff in time. But also, who &$(*ing cares? For my ego it would be nice if it was on ryantate.com with a custom image blah blah blah. But I'd waste a lot of time and energy instead of just writing. So today I tried just writing. I think it went pretty well. Whether the writing is any good or interesting to anyone is another question. But at least I didn't faff around with tool sh*t. I wrote. I used the blog tool to blog. Mission accomplished.#
PS My other blog (prior blog?) is here. Even older posts are here.#
PPS I did eventually figure out how to make a new name for the blog.#
PPPS Dave says the answer to the questions above is "yes" for each.#
Taibbi: “All over, ‘smart’ lost its luster. ‘Smart’ bombs turned out mainly to be efficient machines for creating civilian casualties, ‘intelligence’ became a synonym for grotesque security oversights and mass law-breaking, and commercial media especially became a place where the ordinary person could see the almost total moral uselessness of advanced degrees. In one of Sandel’s most interesting passages, he talks about the conclusions the average person drew from watching the increasing vapidity of ‘ what passes for political argument’ in public discourse: ‘Citizens across the political spectrum find this empty public discourse frustrating and disempowering. They rightly sense that the absence of robust public debate does not mean that no policies are being decided. It simply means they are being decided elsewhere, out of public view…’”#
Dave: Facebook is at least seven things. Journalists don’t distinguish. (Me: I think it’s worse than that. I think journalists for the most part ignore the user community, except when they can use it to tell a preconceived story, for example about disinformation. I think Facebook’s connections to the rest of the web barely register as a story, except when news publications are suffering. The story of how Facebook impacts communities at a human level is very interesting but will require time and patience that is mostly lacking in journalism.)#
It’s interesting to me that Twitter can tell me whenever someone mentions my tweet, but no blog or web platform can tell me when someone mentions a post, even though the enabling technology is baked into the web. #
it’s also interesting to me that I wasn’t able to find a namespace extension to RSS for likes or re-shares, even though these have become ubiquitous online social patterns, even implemented on some blogging platforms. I’m surprised no one has created this. (It makes sense it wasn’t built in when RSS started, because the social platforms and patterns didn’t exist yet. But there is a namespace extension mechanism, and at least one “social” open format (namespace?) adopted once by some blog platforms, though it does not do likes or re-shares.)#
(None of this is a complaint about this or any other blog platform. I’m just surprised it has not been done. When I used to think about building my own publishing platform this was a feature I envisioned. Maybe I can build it some day, maybe as an extension to something else.)#
Leighton Woodhouse: “Foucault … believed that the modern state is not an edifice that looms, metaphorically, over its citizens, as it was in the feudal era, but one that permeates us through our culture, in our daily lives, in our very minds. It’s generated from within the society that the state is tasked with administering — specifically, by its intelligentsia.” #
I’ve been reading a very good book about Finnish independence and civil war. Time after time, the Reds snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. For all their talk of revolution, they were too timid to enact one. They wanted history to take care of it for them (as they believed their their guiding Marxist theories foretold). Their biggest mistake was backing down from the general strike that preceded and helped precipitate the civil war. They had a genuine surge of worker revolutionary sentiment on their hands. Instead of feeling empowered, they felt scared. Fundamentally, they did not trust the workers. Fundamentally, at all pivotal moments, they acted like the bourgeoisie they supposedly wanted to overthrow. #
(I’m talking here specifically of the socialist political leadership, mostly the SDP elite. The revolutionary workers councils and red guards and union members were all much more strident, although at one key moment one of the councils did lose its nerve as well, as I recall.)#
This makes me think of Bernie Sanders. In his backbone and ideological consistency, Sanders is a giant among senators and within the whole Congress. As a presidential candidate he repeatedly prioritized preserving personal relationships and his self conception — what I believe he’d call his principles — over winning.#
He pulled the punch when asked about a second order Hillary Clinton coverup, and was applauded. But the scandal (however minor, relatively) pointed to a real and repeated issue for the candidate, and a more eager opponent seized on it to decisive effect in the general election. #
He put his friendship with Joe Biden over his opposition to much of what Biden stood for, and refused to meaningfully draw contrasts between his (often much more popular) positions and Biden’s. This despite accepting huge amounts of individual donations from ordinary people who wanted him to win. In the end the establishment (of course) still conspired against his candidacy to an extraordinary degree, for the second time. #
None of which is to say he’s a bad person or politician — he’s admirable, in fact — but he’s not a good model for a winning leftist presidential candidate. To be honest someone like that will resemble Trump in many aspects of their campaign approach, along with Bernie and others. #
The example of Finland in 1917/1918 makes clear the cost of niceties, decorum, and using ego and precious maxims to guide tactics. It is a ruin. #
A pundit the other day accurately referred to one of the U.S’s most recent wars as “debased.” I think that’s also an accurate way to refer to the state of our nation right now. #
I think the path toward restoring unity and progress in my country runs inevitably through massive improvements in how we collectively synthesize and communicate information. We need a much more trustworthy process for distributing knowledge. #
The current stage of our pandemic is obviously fueled by poor knowledge transfer. It’s not just the misinformation available online — it’s also the way the drugs industry has indeed corrupted our medical establishment and regulatory system, the history of deception by our elected officials, the history of basic errors by journalists, and the poor quality of medical journalism, including routinely failing to provide context for studies and events. Even if journalists and authorities happen to be right about the vaccine (which for the record they mostly are), the history of being very wrong in other contexts (like opioids) lends credence to bad information. #
Starting twenty years ago, two successive national hysterias, and a stream of misinformation from authorities, coupled with poor fact checking by journalists, led us into two misguided wars (only one brave politician dared oppose the first). #
Every election I have been alive for expresses the fundamental dysfunction in this country between poorly communicated truths and misleading or outright false information propagated by the corrupt and unwitting. The reason money plays such a large role in our political process is that truth is so fungible in this country — political ads gain power as trust in various informational institutions (like journalism) erodes, often for good reason. #
For many years I focused on the journalism industry, because I know first hand it has a huge problem with quality, including accuracy and other nuance, and other elements of trust. It is also poor at clarity, context, and providing information with greater shelf life. #
But I now see this problem goes beyond any one industry. We are collectively responsible for educating one another, and education is a lifetime thing. That word doesn’t just mean schools. As Philip Greenspun began teaching us in the late 1990s, education is a huge part of what happens on all kinds of websites and other information systems. Journalism, when done well, is education. Ditto Wikipedia, StackOverflow, SeriousEats, and many more entities. #
In California, where I lived for many years, the government subsidizes continuing education for adults through a strong community college system (and excellent two tier system of four year universities). #
In other countries, the government owns and funds news media, including public television networks. They even fund political campaigns, while capping or forbidding donations and limiting expenditures. #
Journalism in this country has, and has long had, a massive quality problem. It is basically run by people too hidebound and insulated to care, even 25+ years into the age of mass internet (they do care even more now about clicks, views, ratings, and selling hard to cancel subscriptions, for better or worse). #
But this country doesn’t need to rely nearly so much on journalists any longer, just as it doesn’t need to rely so much on tv networks, cable networks, or YouTube. With the right efforts, funding, and focus, this country from the government down can rehabilitate its information system on a huge scale. I point to some possible areas of focus a bit here but this needs everyone’s imagination and effort. It would be very good for this country and is long overdue. #
PS The work Dave has been doing building and advocating open platforms and formats for many years is going to be an important part any healthy change to our information system, from where I sit, key to all this. (In fact to me this goes without saying, but I should probably say it.)#
Kristen Breitweiser lost her husband 20 years ago in the 9/11 attacks. The activism she has done since has been remarkable. Through meticulous research and tenacious work pushing Congress and the national security establishment, she and fellow 9/11 families sparked the creation of the 9/11 commission and helped enact a series of federal reforms. #
Today at The Intercept we publish her call to unseal intelligence to bring 9/11 co-conspirators to trial. She points out that for all the infringement of civil liberties since 9/11, for all the torture and war, which she condemns, not one 9/11 conspirator has been fully prosecuted in our courts. In fact, the “bare knuckle” treatment of prisoners has actually hindered the pursuit of actual justice for victims’ families. #
It is a powerful piece by a relentless person with hard-won wisdom: #
Terry Albury: “The reality of what I was a part of hit me in a way that just shattered my existence. There is this mythology surrounding the war on terrorism, and the F.B.I., that has given agents the power to ruin the lives of completely innocent people based solely on what part of the world they came from, or what religion they practice, or the color of their skin. And I did that. I helped destroy people. For 17 years.”#
These past two days have been the most beautiful in NYC this year. Many of my fellow local journalists seem to have spent them denouncing people on Twitter. My kids pulled me out of all that. They wanted to join me on my daily run. Nothing like pushing a double-wide stroller around Prospect Park at 6mph to snap you back into sunny, sweaty reality!#
It also helped that I had a 5am shift at the local co-op. Up at 3:30, and walking through Park Slope in the wake of Ida an hour later. The low ebb of the neighborhood at that hour is lovely. Not empty, just slow, even peaceful, which you don't get much, even in Brooklyn, even in the park. Anyway, apparently the co-op's basement, where the food backstock is kept, flooded during the storm. Not the worst impact of the storm by a long shot, some New Yorkers lost their lives. #
At the co-op, the water didn't touch the food because everything is kept at least six inches off the floor, usually on plastic pallets that are everywhere down there. They had drained it by the time my shift started, but were still dealing with the residual water. Eventually they'd have to clean the floors with bleach. But it was too early for any of us member workers to help. The truck traffic (my job is usually unloading pallets of produce coming off the trucks) was light due to the weather, and pecifically due to accidents that backed up post-storm traffic. #
This is pretty much my life — the square mile or so around my apartment in south Park Slope ("South Slope") Brooklyn. I love it. This sort of focus is very healthy for me. The pandemic has intensified these confines, which can feel claustrophobic, mostly within the walls of my apartment, and only from time to time. But one thing I've learned about New York in the seven years since I moved here is that most New Yorkers live "small" lives, geographically, like this, even before the pandemic. It doesn't mean your life isn't very rich and "big" in other ways. But until I moved here I had no idea how far 10 blocks really feels, once you live here. That's maybe a 10 minute walk. At a certain point you develop this attitude of, "how much better could something be, some store or restaurant or whatever, that it's worth going beyond the three or four blocks I'm really comfortable visiting?" Especially when in those three or four blocks, in New York, there can be quite a lot.#
I like to think I picked a good little area for myself. South Slope still has a soul. Pete Hamill, whose journalism inspired me when I was kid, grew up two blocks down, and briefly lived about a block up my street. He wrote a whole memoir about this neighborhood (and about his relationship with alcohol). My landlord, who must be 90, knew Pete since they were kids. You won't find many New Yorkers who will speak well of their landlords, but mine is a decent guy, at least these days, who helped promote and develop this corner of Brooklyn. There is a great gym across the street at the old armory, a spectacular YMCA, that our outgoing mayor had a hand in saving, and where I was sort saved myself, although that's a story for another day. We have three great bars, which is important, each distinctively great - the Double Windsor for good food and beer and people a little like me; Farrell's, the oldest bar, and with a crowd of people a little unlike me (a lot of cops, for example); and American Cheese, a total dive that's open late. #
There's Cafe Grumpy, my coffee shop since our first morning here, fresh off a cab ride from JFK, with a seventh month old and no plates or silverware, our coffee pot left behind in Berkeley.#
And then there's the park, the irreplaceable Prospect Park. And the co-op. And the new cheese store. And the new bakery that's the one thing the food critics like in our neighborhood (it is indeed good). And on and on. It's nice to have a neighborhood. Sure beats Twitter.#
When I was in college I used to read Dave Winer's Scripting News. I'd read his DaveNet email newsletter, and his Wired column of the same name. The term "blog" did not exist yet, but I knew I wanted something like Scripting News. I wanted it for my college paper, where I was an editor (eventually the editor in chief), and I wanted it for myself. #
Recently, amid a lot of toxicity on Twitter, and feeling the need for some kind of outlet in my middle age (midlife crisis blogging?), I started to look for a way to blog in that Scripting News style, where you don't need to give everything a headline like on most blogging tools, and where it's wired up to a good easy authoring environment, like an outliner. But also where you can give more depth and context than on $#%ing Twitter. I didn't really find it and made some plans to build something myself some day, maybe, eventually....#
Then I saw Dave has a new tool, built to write Scripting News style. I saw this.... on Scripting News. Which is 25 years old, give or take!#
Today, I finally have it for myself. Two decades in, I can blog like Scripting News. Cooool.#
There is a big temptation for computer geeks like me to bikeshed — I think that word means, like, faff around — with blogging software. Like when I started to learn about tis new tool, Drummer, I started thinking thoughts like#
Can I make a new name for the blog, not just "blog?"#
I'm sure I can and will "fix" some of this stuff in time. But also, who &$(*ing cares? For my ego it would be nice if it was on ryantate.com with a custom image blah blah blah. But I'd waste a lot of time and energy instead of just writing. So today I tried just writing. I think it went pretty well. Whether the writing is any good or interesting to anyone is another question. But at least I didn't faff around with tool sh*t. I wrote. I used the blog tool to blog. Mission accomplished.#
PS My other blog (prior blog?) is here. Even older posts are here.#
PPS I did eventually figure out how to make a new name for the blog.#
PPPS Dave says the answer to the questions above is "yes" for each.#
Copyright 2021, Ryan Tate
Last update: Saturday September 18, 2021; 5:20 PM EDT.